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This is a little less poetic, and a little more essay, but I have not had time to write as I would have liked, and this is what wanted to be written tonight.

unspoken

As I listened to Nikia Chaneydescribing her desire to give fear a face and make it known through writing,

I was transported to a primitive placesurrounded by darkness and unknown dangerslurking in the shadows, clicking and clawingat the recesses of my mind, and I realizedthat early man lived in fear of the unknown.

How comforting it must have been toname those sounds and be calmed by knowledge.

How words evolved into story telling,which begat ethos and mythos.

How powerful it is to name our fears,suddenly bringing them out into the open,confronting them and finding there is nothing.

To deny the right to utter a name like JHVH, or He Who Shall Not Be Named,takes us back to our primal fear,

my mother must have doted over my little baby feetjust as i have with my child.counting tiny toes, caressing arches that had not yet walked,pressing them gently into soft clay.

she even saved my first ceramic vase.i was so excited to make it for her,rolling the hard pottery clay into snake-like ropes, coilingthem into a tower, painting it with blue and pink and white.i was eager to see it firedin the kiln, to see her shine when she filled it with flowers.

i was sad to see how my towermelted in the heat, and leanedto one side, the coils shiftingand cracking open untilit could not hold water.the colors muted and dull.

but my mother did not mind.i was always embarrased to seethat vase proudly displayedon the bookshelf, next tothe pictures of our ancestors.it was still there as i packed up her house

her body meltedand cracked openin the heat of a kiln,sending her atomsback to the earthto make new clay.

people keep getting lost in plain sight.like the man, right here on Mt Rubidoux, trapped for six days, 100 feet from the trail.how could hundreds of people pass by every dayand not notice a man was calling for help.how could no-one have noticed he was missingand gone out looking for him?

i keep getting lost in plain sight,trapped in the darkness of my mind, unheard by people passing by me,no-one noticing that i am missing.

I was enjoying a Sister Spit performance at UCR tonight, which connected me with a memory about chalkboards, and how sometimes people write their secrets on them, secrets they can’t hold inside of them any longer for fear they will split in two.

secrets

Jeg går i seng med min lærer

someone thought they were sneaky,writing their secret in Danishon a study lounge chalkboardat the university where i work.i chuckle and helpfully translate it to english just below:

I am sleeping with my teacher

i wish i could have seentheir face when they saw it.years later, i wrote my own secreton a different chalkboard:

My mother died two weeks ago,I still cry every day.

it doesn’t need translation,i wish i could have seen the moment when someonehad the strength to erase it.maybe it would help me forgetwatching her slip away.

For my first poem for NaPoWriMo (National Poem Writing Month) challenge I wanted to write about SUNDOGS. Capitalized here because I stumbled upon this word while playing Words With Friends, and then wanted to know what it was. As it turns out, sundogs are “ghost suns” caused by icy crystals in the air acting as prisms and creating additional images of the sun in the sky. Check out Wikipedia for some great images, and historical references to how ancient people thought they were either bad omens, or good omens, depending on their personal outlook on life.

I knew I wanted to write a poem about sundogs, which got me thinking about what they meant to me. I latched onto the idea of the pagan/spiritual “familiar”, which is, typically, an animal spirit. I also thought about how pets are a form of “familiar”, and that often pets look like their owners, and how people latch onto things that feel more “familiar”.

which is a whole lot of backstory for a very short poem:

sundogs

look at their faces, and i see my own.look into their eyes, i see mine reflected.the devil gave them to do my bidding.they flank my sides,faithful and loyal.they rise with mein the morning,and return to earthwith me at night.

Calling all poets! April is National Poetry Writing Month — NaPoWriMo for short. Modeled after National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), NaPoWriMo is an annual project encouraging poets to write one poem each day in April.